Rejected: What’s next?

“I belong to nowhere. I hate the day I was born”

Bahr Jasim

Mahmoud and Khalil have lost hope and the meaning of life. They are living in the same situation: They don’t know what will happen to them or how the rest of their life will be. The asylum life is boring and depressing since they can’t do anything to change the situation.

Mahmoud and Khalil are now facing to be moved to the former prison Kærshovedgaard, which now serves as return center for rejected asylum seekers. They don’t want to move there. They expect the climate in this kind of camp to be worse than a life in prison, because, as they describe, there is no pocket money, a limit of movement and unwelcoming staff serving the same boring meals.

Status quoThey have the feeling that their escape from their homes has only put them in the same situation. Nothing has changed. More stress and more depression.

“We can’t go back home, as we don’t have any”, Mahmoud and Khalil say.

From a miserable small camp for Iranian Kurds in the west of Iraq, where Khalil Ibrahim was born, to another asylum camp in Denmark with various stops on his way, Khalil was seeking a normal life as a human being. But the reality wasn’t as he dreamt of, Denmark wasn’t the last stop, shows a letter from the Danish authorities.

Foto: Bahr Jasim

Ajourney of hope and disappointmentKhalil’s parents are some of the Iranian refugees who escaped from Iran to Iraq in 1980’s because of their political work after the Islamic revolution in 1979. Khalil was born and grew up in miserable camps in Iraq.

In 2003, after the American war in Iraq, the security situation in the Al Tash Camp was going from bad to worse and there was constantly a threat of being attacked by strangers.

Khalil was in a terrible situation, as well as everyone else in the camp. They didn’t have the freedom to move, they could hardly find a job to feed themselves because they had no official papers to prove who they were. The only thing Khalil had was an identity paper given by UNHCR. Khalil decided to leave the camp and start a new journey full of hope, the journey ended in Denmark where he hasbeen seeking asylum since…

I can’t sign the deportation papers because they want to deport me to Iran, which is not my country. I don’t even speak Farsi Khalil, asylum seeker

Back to GazaMahmoud was born in Gaza, in a camp in his own country, he is in his thirties and has now beenliving in an asylum center north of Denmark for two years. Danish authorities have rejected his case twice.After the second rejection, Mahmoud had an interview with the police where they asked him if he wanted to collaborate with them and sign the deportation paper. Mahmoud took his lawyer’s advice and signed his deportations papers for going back to Gaza in Palestine:“If I refused to collaborate and signed the paper, they would transfer me to a closed camp” Mahmoud says.
As requested from Danish police, Mahmoud went to the Mission of Palestine in Denmark to ask them to deliver him a travel document to use it to go to Gaza.

“I know that they can’t deport me to Gaza, there is no way to do that. I know that from a friend of mine. The authorities tried to deport him through Egypt and Israel in vain”.

Nowhere to belongKhalil situation isn’t any better. He got rejected twice as well, but he refused to sign the deportation papers.“I can’t sign the deportation papers because they want to deport me to Iran, which is not my country. I don’t even speak Farsi”, Khalil explains.

As a result, the police decided to put Khalil in a closed camp, where he will spend the rest of his time in Denmark.“I am not an Iranian citizen, I belong to nowhere. I hate the day I was born” Khalil says.